When Muslims kill Jews as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing while cursing them as "apes and pigs", it's not like the Holocaust. But when Syrian Muslims, at least 13% of whom support ISIS, want to invade America... it's exactly like the Holocaust.
That's the shameless abuse of history perpetrated by Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post who helped popularize that disgusting, "Muslim Migrants = Holocaust Survivors" meme. As documented by James Kirchick. (There are numerous problems with Kirchick's piece, but the points he makes about Tharoor are quite valid.)
Ishaan Tharoor, a writer for the Post’s WorldViews blog, concluded, “Today’s three-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” (In September, Tharoor had made the same point about European reactions to the crisis, in a post entitled, “Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930’s anti-Semitism.”...
Tharoor’s sympathetic appropriation of the Jewish refugee experience to shame those who question Western governmental capacity to absorb millions of Syrians is ironic given the sedulous efforts he has made in lecturing others—mainly Jews and Israelis—who dare mention the history of Jewish suffering as a means of contextualizing its present-day manifestations. A survey of his work shows that Tharoor uses Holocaust allegories when they’re suitable to his political goals and dismisses them as cheap propaganda whenever they’re employed to make points with which he doesn’t agree...
Muslims are the new Jews has become an Islamic form of political replacement theology. So when Muslims kill Jews, it's nothing like the Holocaust. Just ask Tharoor.
Last year, when two Palestinians armed with meat cleavers hacked five Jews to death in West Jerusalem, Tharoor took to his keypad to scold Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for stating that the murders were the result of a “blood libel” against Jews. Such language was “explosive,” Tharoor claimed, while neglecting to describe, never mind attach adjectives to, the hair-raising anti-Semitic incitement emitted on a daily basis from official organs of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas....
In a May post titled “7 things that are not like the Holocaust,” ... Tharoor listed “The actions of Islamists” as being “not like the Holocaust.”
“As leader of a state that emerged directly after the horrors of the Holocaust, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may feel he has a particular moral right to invoke the evils of the Nazis when inveighing against his present-day enemies,” Tharoor inveighed. “But that doesn’t mean he’s right in making the parallel. Netanyahu raises the specter of Nazism frequently in speeches criticizing Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, the terrorist Islamic State, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a geopolitical foe.”
As a purely analytical exercise, a cursory sampling of these entities’ anti-Semitic greatest hits—ranging from a “covenant” that calls for the murder of “warmongering Jews” to the actual bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina that killed 85 innocents—merits at least passing contrast to the ideology of Nazism, certainly as much as the dilemma of Syrian refugees.
But the universalization of the Holocaust has meant its appropriation to serve any random cause of the left while at the same time being routinely used against Israel. Thus it's not fair to compare Muslims killing Jews to Nazis, but it is fair to compare Jews fighting back against Muslim terrorists to Nazis.
And when Muslims collaborated with Nazis to kill Jews... they also weren't like the Nazis.
He downplayed the Mufti’s fanatical Jew-hatred by enveloping it within a broader narrative of legitimate anti-colonial struggle. “In hindsight, World War II lends itself to a simple, stark binary as a conflict between genocidal fascists and their opponents. But for myriad communities that experienced the invasions of the Germans and Japanese, the war offered something else—the prospect of liberation from other occupying empires.”
To summarize, Muslims can never be like the Nazis. But they can always be considered victims of the Holocaust... even if they're trying to kill Jews.